I’ve always kept a journal since I was young, and for every New Year’s Eve I write a letter to myself. I write about the big pivots or lessons from my year, and what mindset I want for the New Year. Here are somethings from my letter this year:
2018 was a time of a lot of change: I graduated college and started a new job in a new city.
Before I started my senior year, one of my friends/older mentors gave me the best advice I could have heard “Say yes to everything.” I went to every college event, spent more time with my friends, and was more involved with my professors than I had ever been before. It left me feeling without regrets on graduation day.
I moved to Silicon Valley for my dream job and company (something that I still can’t believe is real). Almost all of my friends stayed in San Diego, and I knew only a handful of people in my new city. There is something very real after college, that I’ve heard called the “Post-Grad Depression”. You don’t have the same community, friends, or exact plan that you had in college. It affected a lot of my friends and I, but then I realized it’s something that takes time--just like it did in college. It took me four years to develop those things, so why did I think it would be the same in a matter of months here? I’ve been working for 6 months now, and I’ve slowly but surely been finding my place, and very excited for everything to come.
I started to have a better relationship with myself, and in 2019 I want to focus on “holistic health”.
I used to equate health with losing weight and eating healthy, and then later in college I realized that wasn’t a good enough definition. First, I was perpetually stressed (like most people in our generation) and acclimating rather than managing it. Second, I wasn’t consistent with my exercise, because I either felt like I didn’t have time or sometimes it seemed like it would be a large task mentally. Then one finals I tried walking on a treadmill while reading notes, and it was amazing. I started thinking of exercise as something relaxing, not strict, that I could do in small doses everyday instead of pushing myself hard a few days a week. I also liked the productivity, so now I mostly go on the elliptical and watch YouTube videos of speakers, webinars related to my work, or documentaries so I leave with a brain workout too. Finally, I was completing tasks in my life and work like they were a checklist to a goal, rather than experiences that could lead to an impact. I check-in with myself more now through journaling, and understanding what makes me feel fulfilled and "happy".
Holistic health has become a popular and trendy philosophy, and really just means that you are looking at the body, mind, emotions, and soul for your overall wellness. A year ago, I would have been the first to think that it was silly to spend time on things with abstract benefits like “self-care” or meditating. However, no extra amount of time in the gym can equate to how much better I feel now as a person after working on my whole self.
There were things happening in the world and our culture, and I decided I wanted to be a part of the storytelling.
The media is like the narrator of a story you’re being told about the world, and so they can shape how you understand it. The societal narrative created by things like TV shows, movies, magazine publications, and newspapers impact what we see are the standards of language, stereotypes, culture, beauty, and success. I’ve seen and felt the shifting narrative around women, from the look of models in magazines, to movies with strong women protagonists. Cierra and I created this blog because we were inspired by the shifting narrative, and wanted to fill in some of the gaps that we saw—so no one gets left behind in the story.
CHEERS, KELLY